How much butter/sugar is needed to sink a ship?

A fellow Nanoer with no access to this site today has an important question. Help him out?

How much butter and sugar is needed to sink a ship?

From what I've gathered, feel free to use whatever sort of ship you'd like to get your answer.

For starters, butter is mostly oil and will float, so no amount of butter will sink a ship.

Sugar is less dense than water. If it didn't dissolve, sugar would float as well. So if you wrapped it in a water tight unit, it should float.

That's a fair point. I've passed on the message :) Are there any ways you would be able to get butter to sink? It's unlikely, I know, but more likely than sugar xD

What about if the butter was packed in something? Whatever it was packed in would have to weigh more than the butter itself to stop the butter from floating. If whatever the butter is in is heavy enough, would it enable the butter (indirectly, at least) to sink the ship?

Water has a density of 1000kg/cu.m

Butter has a density of 865 kg/cu.m

Since the density of butter is less than that of water, it floats. If you used packaging that would increase the density of the total package to something over 1000kg/cu.m, it would sink. But also note that once you package it, you have an issue with filling the vessel to the point were the space between the containers is offset as well.

Sugar has different densities depending on the type of sugar:

Sugar, brown 721kg/cu.m
Sugar, powdered 801kg/cu.m
Sugar, granulated 849kg/cu.m
Sugar, raw cane 961kg/cu.m
Sugarbeet pulp, dry 208kg/cu.m
Sugarbeet pulp, wet 561kg/cu.m
Sugarcane 272kg/cu.m

Note that all of them have densities that are less than water, indicating that they should float.

http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm
http://sugartech.co.za/density/

Not claiming to be an expert or anything, but dropping a bag of sugar in water is rather misleading in this case. The real problem here is that boats are specifically designed not to sink. If you put the sugar in a vessel that's designed to float, it will take quite a bit more to offset the buoyancy that results from water displacement. (The weight of an object is reduced by its volume multiplied by the density of the fluid. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(fluid). )

It seems like all you really need is enough force to get the boat low enough in the water that flooding does the work even after the butter/sugar begins to dissolve or float away. And that really depends on how the butter/sugar is going to get on the boat in the first place.

If it's loaded bit by bit from a dock, then you probably want to look elsewhere for something with enough density to initiate the sinking process, for reasons previously mentioned.

On the other hand, if you're talking about dropping several tons on the boat from a cargo plane? Then it might work. Maybe.

I'd say load the ship up with several tons of butter & sugar, then have a saboteur plant an explosive in the middle of it all.

Bearing in mind that it is not neccessary for the butter to sink; it is simply neccessary for the butter to lower the ship's sides far enough that water can get in and then the ship will proceed to sink by itself.

In simple terms, the upthrust caused by water, which we will call F, is determined by 9.81 (density of water) (volume submerged), or 9.81 (tonnage), where tonnage is the measurement used to determine the mass of water displaced

For the ship to float, F cannot be less than the weight of the ship plus its cargo.

Thus, at the limit just before it sinks, 9.81 (tonnage) = 9.81 (mass of ship) + 9.81 (mass of cargo), or, simplifying,

(Tonnage) = (combined mass of ship and cargo).

Rearranging gives us

(Mass of cargo) = (tonnage) - (mass of ship)

To sink the ship, therefore, you just need to find out if it is possible to pack that much butter onto the ship. My suspicion is yes, because even if filling the whole ship won't do it., you can just keep stacking more butter ON TOP of the ship.

A bit more help: You can probably find the total cargo space of the ship somewhere. The mass of butter that you can therefore fit in that cargo space would be this volume x (density of butter)

Sorry, I forgot that tonnage is only in terms of volume. You have to multiply by a factor of between 1000 to 1030, depending on fresh, briny, summer or winter water.

Here's a real world anecdote to ponder regarding this weighty topic:

http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/tapioca.asp

I like the idea of wrapping butter or sugar in steel.

Since sugar is very hygroscopic, it will absorb a great deal of water. It is also more dense than water. Thus, fill boat with sugar, poke a hole(s) just under the water line so water reaches the sugar. The sugar will wick the water in, absorbing it. Some sugar will dissolve, but not very quickly. The sugar will turn into a heavy wet mess, the boat will be full of water AND stuff heavier than water, so down it will go. (May vary if the boat is made of superlight materials, but that's not typical) Now, I hope you weren't concerned about keeping the boat down. Most modern boats do have a certain amount of 'float material' in their construction so that even filled with water, they aren't supposed to sink. Eventually, sheer volume of water will dissolve all the sugar (and fish will need fillings), and the boat is likely to re-float (not well, its still full of water).

Butter?? Are we squeezing the Argo through narrow straights? Pfft. Throw the butter on the sugar, light boat on fire. Won't sink but might taste interesting. Cookie Cutter Ship?

Not being much of a chemist and horrible at math, I ask more about how the butter and such is supposed to be sinking said ship. On top of that, this also begs the question the setting/time of the story. Since more can be done to use butter as a weapon today than say 100 years ago: science and technology and such.

I'm sure there's a way to boil down butter and use it to cast something such as a cannonball shape. When frozen it could probably be powerfully effective - especially if fired/launched from another ship, or dingy. And if weighing science into it; I'm sure liquid nitrogen could help give a sphere of butter some hull-shattering capability.

Additionally, a well-directed shot to a propeller or rudder could do enough damage as well: clogging the engine or causing the ship to have steering issues.

If not speaking purely about butter, something inside of it could sink a boat. Making it a sticky bomb sort of substance (with the right sugar type and mixture), and with an electromagnet of sort...the ship could have its hull melted somehow. Adding in the salt water as a conductor, it could do wacky stuff. I know hearing a lot of modern fishing boats and such have so much electronics running through it, the corrosive power can be deadly if exposed wires and such breaching/melting the hull if a watchful eye isn't kept.

For what it's worth, there's a different way at looking at it. Hmmm... Butter. Do wonder the backstory on this question.

get the butter hot and you could always just burn a whole in the ship and it would sink. does that count?

Three ways to sink a ship with sugar and butter:

Way 1:
Amount of Sugar and Butter: Sugar-1 cup Butter- 1/2 cup, melted.
Instructions: Use sugar and butter to make cookies to put on the boat.
Strategy: This causes the author to be anoyed that they cannot eat said cookies and so out of hatred they sink the ship.
Added Word Count: It depends on if you are willing to break the fourth wall.

Way 2:
Amount of Sugar and Butter: Sugar- 1 teaspoon to 50 pounds Butter- (Optional)
Instructions: Give sugar to that hyper character, and a missle launcher.
Strategy: Are you nuts!? He's hyper enough as is.
Added Word Count: As long as hyper character isn't mute, there is no limit.

Way 3:
Amount of Sugar and Butter: Sugar- 1 large bag Butter- Enough to Create a Surface Area Equivalent to Length of Ship
Instructions: Butter the wooden deck of the carmel making ship.
Strategy: When trying to move the sugar and fire to use for carmel (which they foolishly gave to one person) that person shall slip, light the deck on fire and sink the boat.
Added Word Count: Well, it just lost me a potential 157 to come up with this, I don't know what it will gain you.

Way 4:
Amount of Sugar and Butter: Whatever you feel like.
Instructions: Make the setting of your historical fiction the Titanic.
Strategy: Need I say more?
Added Word Count: Hopefully 50,000 because this would be your whole book.

...I am the person who wanted this topic started, simply over some awesome cookies a NaNo-er brought to a write-in, who claimed she'd used enough butter/sugar to sink a ship.

This is AWESOME.

And it's questions like these that makes me love this community.

Awesome.

Perhaps if you set the materials on fire you could sink a ship.

I want cookies.

Put all the butter and sugar on one side of the ship. The heavy wieght along with being off balance should get one side low enough for water to enter.